Whimper
by Killing Joke
Summary: When the world ends, what happens to a man's living, breathing vendetta?
1. Alisa

"_This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang, but a whimper." - T S Eliot_

The world ended.

I don't know if you ever think about it. The world ending, I mean. I know I didn't. Not really. I had a job, I had somewhere to live, I knew how the world worked.

I guess that I always expected that if the world was going to end, it would be pretty spectacular, and everyone would notice immediately. Big things would blow up, or aliens would invade and we'd all die.

I kind of figured perhaps we'd just suddenly turn on the TV and the news announcer would say "Sorry about this, folks, but in exactly twenty minutes the world is going to end and we're all going to die." And it'd be scary and terrible and unexpected, but at least it'd be quick.

But it wasn't like that at all.

My name is Alisa, and I'm twenty-six years old next March. I used to work as a cleaner at the bank, and I wasn't anybody important at all. I liked it that way. Being unimportant meant you didn't get spied on by the Ear or have your family disappear overnight when the Fingermen came by. But now there's no Ear, no Finger, and I'm one of the most important people in the whole world.

I survived. Me and the others: Jake, Brandon, Rowena, Sally - and Guy. There aren't many of us, so we're precious and rare. We survived the end of the world.

For a while, I thought I was the only one.

The world didn't end quickly in a big explosion, like I was saying. It happened quite slowly, at first. I went to work on the Tuesday morning, an ordinary Tuesday with my uniform on and my permit in my hand. The bank was one of the big buildings near the wharf, you couldn't miss it. Every morning a stream of people filing in, like ants, and at the end of the day the same. Like clockwork. Reliable. I liked it. I had to be there before the nine to five crowd arrived, to empty the wastebaskets and vacuum the floors. Like I said, I was one of the invisible people and glad of it. We had a little room in the basement where we could sit and watch the TV, us invisible people, and that's where we saw it start. Gloria and I: Gloria died, I guess, because I never saw her again after the Thursday. She had a great smile and one gold tooth. That's all I really remember about her now.

The Thames began to rise. There were pictures of the water, and an official from the Nose standing up to his ankles in it, holding a measuring stick. He was smiling, and people were laughing at him with his trousers rolled up, because it's so rare to see someone in authority acting like that. He was telling us not to worry, that it was just a late autumn tide, that it would be going down again in a day or so.

So we didn't worry. The Government knew what they were doing. It's their job, right? I went home, spoilt myself by splashing out an extra coupon on water for a bath, then got up in the morning and didn't even realise anything was wrong until I wasn't allowed to get on my usual bus to work. The streets, the driver said, were flooded. We'd have to go the long way round and come up the wharf from the south side. We all did what we were told because it was the only way we knew.

My jeans were soaked by the time I walked into our little basement room. Gloria was late that day: and when she arrived she was wet through and her hair was stuck flat to her head with water. The rain, she said, was coming down in sheets.

The TV said the same: the announcers made some jokes about ducks and swimming pools but still told us not to worry, that everything was being taken care of. I often wonder if any of the people who were already dying at this point heard the jokes. Whether it was the last thing they heard, even. I really hope they didn't. But then nobody knew people were dying except the ones who were doing it, and word didn't get out. No word got out except the words the chancellor wanted you to hear. Guy told me a lot of this later, once he started to talk again. Guy's a clever man, but more about him once I've got through the hard bit.

On Thursday, it was all over.

I guess it'll probably take years for anyone to work out the reason for what happened. Global warming. Freak storms. Act of god. Does it even matter? I didn't even finish geography at school, I wouldn't understand it if someone tried to explain. For me, it _just happened_. Knowing why wouldn't make it any better or solve anything.

The waters rose from below and hammered down from above harder than I could ever have imagined. There had never been rains like that before, so there was no way anyone could have guessed what it would be like. What it could do.

I went to bed after curfew, as always, and when I next woke up I was the only one alive.

I'd like to say that moment of waking up was the most terrifying possible, but I've experienced a lot more terror since. I woke up when my building was destroyed. I can't describe it properly, because it was everything at once: the cacophony of screams, of concrete and brick crumbling, the building smashed to pieces in less time that it takes to blink. The chill and stink of the water - no slow rise, just a sudden plunge, the water rising up from below to engulf through the floor as the windows imploded in sodden showers of glass. The brick and stone sank, and I floated, in that watery limbo, not knowing what had happened.

There wasn't even time for pain, and it was just before dawn, so it was dark and through the abrupt murk of the water I couldn't see. Things I couldn't begin to guess at smashed past my legs, my arms, my head. I was probably bleeding. But none of these things matter when you're underwater: only one thing is important, and that's that there is no air. I couldn't breathe. Instinct took over, and my body moved for light, for surface.

I found it. Millions didn't. I don't know how. I wish I could say I felt what they call survivor's guilt - why me, instead of hundreds of others, people who might have been more worthy, more useful? But I don't. I'm glad to be alive, and proud that I managed to find a new home with the only others that survived. Maybe that makes me a bad person, I don't know. But if you're reading this, then you survived too, so I guess you know what I mean.

There's not a lot I can say about the few days that followed. I'm not the right person to tell it, either. It's too big for me. Maybe, if he chooses, Guy could manage it, one day, but I just don't have the skill or the words. What I can say is that the water did recede, and what remained of London emerged slowly from under the new seas. And I, alive and cold, came out to meet it. There were silt beaches in the Strand: I know, I walked along them. Little rivulets of water sparkled between the piles of rubble and smooth expanses of mud. It reminded me of older days when my parents took me to the beach at Anglesea. There were fish, in the little pools, swimming amongst stranded tins and boxes, chairs and cars. I suppose I thought, on those first days, that I was alone in an alien landscape and that there was no-one left in the whole world to see it except me. It all looked very new, and flat, and strange. Every so often I'd find something that I thought I recognised, but the truth is there wasn't anything to recognise, not anymore. It was all gone. Only the birds were still there, gulls and sparrows landing and pecking in the mud. There weren't even as many bodies as I'd feared - I found out later that the water had carried most of them back out when it retreated. It was an empty world, and I was very frightened. Like I said, I'm not a big-picture sort of person, but even I could see that there wasn't any Government anymore. No High Chancellor. Everything had changed overnight and everything I'd grown up believing was gone. No-one in charge, no-one to set a curfew or make the rules or tell us what to do through the TV. And of course the only part of the whole situation (which my own personal fear laid claim to) was that no-one in charge meant no-one to rescue me.

On the third day, I found my first real set of bodies, and Brandon found me.

There wasn't anything dramatic about it. He just called out "Hey! Hey, you!" in the most cheerful voice imaginable, while I was staring in mute horror at the cluster of corpses I'd just discovered inside an upturned skip on the silt flats of Trafalgar. Brandon used to be an accountant for the Nose, not that it matters now when he spends most of his time digging and draining. He has red hair that sticks up in a bright thatch, and glasses, thick glasses that never stay up on his nose. Later I realized that the glasses never stayed up because they weren't his. He'd lost his own when the world ended and had to make do with the best ones he could find.

"Hey, you're alive!" he beamed at me, as he stumbled down the bank of broken furniture, splinters of wood the length of his arm scuttering away from his feet. I watched him numbly, not sure how to react. What's the etiquette for greeting a newcomer when you thought yourself the last human alive? Fortunately, my body knew what to do. It crumpled into his arms, and cried, while Brandon patted and cuddled. He smelt like sunshine, where his wet clothes had dried on him.

His wife and family had been killed, or so he thought, he told me as we walked on through the mud. He didn't know for sure, but seeing as everyone else was dead it was a likely guess. He didn't seem to be grieving very much, with his flickering smiles and kindly words. It was only much later, on that memorable day when we all crouched together in the cornfield in the rain that I saw him cry for them.

And it was with Brandon, when we went out later to see what food we could find on the new salt flats, that I first met -

"Hey," Brandon had said, tapping me on the arm. "Look at _that_."

We thought he was dead, at first. He was lying in the mud, half-covered with a big spill of black cloth that I thought was blanket but turned out to be a cloak, when we got closer. I hadn't even wanted to go - I hated the bodies, tried to do all I could to keep away from their sad, decaying forms - but Brandon was intrigued and pulled me along with his curiosity.

And this body was intriguing, no denying it. For a start, he was wearing a mask.


	2. Guy

"…_he's just this guy, you know?" – Douglas Adams_

Guy. It's what we ended up calling him, as he didn't talk a whole lot in the early days, and we had to give him some sort of a name. It was Jake who was actually responsible for naming him – Jake, the youngest of us and the last survivor we found on the East side. When we'd finished all the other introductions, Jake turned to the smiling mask and said, cheerfully enough "So, who's this guy, what's his story?" And from then on, Guy it was.

"That's so tragic," Brandon said, with the casual airiness that had become so much a part of how I saw him. Everything was tragic. Every new body, every broken piece of flotsam we found. I suppose that surrounded by so much tragedy, it wasn't surprising he'd latched onto it as his favourite word. Somehow it didn't make things any better for me. "Alisa, come and look at this one. He was obviously on his way to a party or something."

I hung back, head turned away so all I could see was the corner of the mud-stained cloak. "I don't want to look. Please, can't we just go? Brandon. Brandon, I want to go."

I know. That was pathetic of me. I think I've become a bit stronger now – we all have, even Guy himself, and he was strong in the first place. But Brandon was persistent. "Seriously, I've never seen anything like it. He's still got a mask on and everything."

He bent down toward the crumpled, sodden body, and then I did move forward, to grab his arm. "Well, don't try and take it off, do you really have to - _Jesus!_"

Because as he was reaching out for the mask's ties, the masked body was rearing up in the mud and a knife was flashing before us, gripped in the man's hand. I could hear his breathing at that point. That's what I remember most, funny, when he must have looked such a horror, but what I've held onto is the sound of his breath hissing harshly through the lips of his mask. In and out, breath rattling in his chest and throat. His lungs had probably been full of water, too, just like mine.

The mask is very plain, by the way. It's not like one of those fancy Venetian things, all gold and swirls and stuff or with a bird's beak or an animal's muzzle. Guy's mask is like an ordinary person's face, sort of pale cream. It has a definite smile to it, and the eyebrows, moustache and beard are picked out in black lines. The cheeks have a touch of rouge to them. It's almost a clown mask, but it can look happy or sad or angry anytime it likes, that's the weird thing.

I guess you're wondering why I'd go into so much detail about a mask. Well, it's because he never takes it off. No, not ever. I've known Guy for almost a year and a half now, and I've never seen any face but that mask. That's who Guy is to me, now. Honestly, if he took it off tomorrow and turned out to be Brad Pitt underneath I'd be upset, because it wouldn't be Guy. It wouldn't be the man I've come to know.

It looked pretty scary that first time, the frozen smiling face with the knife glittering below in the watery sunshine, and I have to say right now, Brandon was great - he pushed me behind him immediately and held up both his hands to Guy, showing him he wasn't armed, just like in the movies.

"Woah, woah, _woah_! Take it easy. Take it easy, all right? We're not going to hurt you. Please, put the knife down. Please. Put it down."

But he didn't move. We just stood there for almost a minute in silence, me and Brandon on one side and Guy standing there poised with his knife on the other, like he was about to stab the both of us, then Brandon tried again, bless his heart.

"Please. My name's Brandon, and this is Alisa, okay? Brandon and Alisa. What's your name?"

And still the mask didn't speak, although I could still hear him breathing, and gradually he began to lower that knife. It seemed to take hours. Brandon's smile grew as the blade became less threatening. "Hey, we're really glad to find someone else alive. Are you okay? Are you hurt?"

But we didn't get any answers from the faceless man. He just stood there, staring at us from behind his mask, until Brandon eventually said: "Can you hear me?"

And the man we eventually called Guy nodded, slowly, making his shoulder-length dark hair bob: at which point I think I stopped being afraid of him. He was real. He was human. And he was alive and alone, just as I had been.

Brandon, after a lengthy one-sided conversation with Guy on the silt beach, persuaded him to come with us. I wrote down some of it, just so you'll get an idea of what it was like communicating with Guy in the early days.

"Are you hurt?" A shake of the head: no.

"Did you used to live round here?" Nod: Yes.

"Aren't you going to take that mask off?" _Emphatic _no.

"Isn't it a bit uncomfortable?" Shrug: not really.

"Well, if you're sure." Nod.

"Are you…are you hungry?"

That was me. I had a Mars bar in my pocket that had washed up on the remains of Fleet Street. I took a step toward him and offered it to him when he nodded, just slightly, warily.

Later on, I worked out that Guy didn't eat except when he was alone. But even then, even at that early stage of distrust, he was perfectly polite. He took the chocolate from me, held it in his gloved hands, and the mask smiled in the bleak light. I smiled back.

"You can have it," I said. "I don't mind."

The only question we couldn't get an answer out of him on was "Are you a mute?". We'd established he wasn't deaf, or slow, but it was an ongoing puzzle to Brandon as to why Guy couldn't or wouldn't speak to us. It was something he asked that first day: "Hey. Er – so. Can you talk at all, or is it like, some sort of thing you've had since birth, or…?"

And Guy had stared at him with the deep black of the mask's eyesockets for several minutes, but there had been no answer in his body language. It wasn't like we even had any paper or pens to try and get him to write. Later, when Guy had vanished off on one of what we would soon start calling "Guy's walkabouts" – he would disappear, sometimes for hours on end, but he always came back, finding us unerringly even if we'd moved on from where he'd left us – Brandon told me his crazy theory, which was that Guy was a roving mime artist who really got lost in his work. The mask also formed part of this theory.

Oh, yeah. We asked about the mask, too, every yes or no question we could think of to put to him, until even Guy - patient, polite Guy - held up his gloved hand in a gesture of _enough_. The answers, as far as he was concerned, were obviously clear. No, he wasn't going to take it off. No, it wasn't stuck on. Yes, the same applied to the gloves. Yes, it was to do with something that had happened to him in the past.

Not knowing drove Brandon wild with curiosity. Not something I shared: it didn't matter much to me. So Guy was a mute in a mask. So what? He was warm and alive and I could hear him breathing nearby when we slept at night. He was a survivor, and obviously a dedicated one because he had more than one of those knives tucked under his cloak and he knew how to use them very well. I figured that he was just doing a hell of a lot of thinking in there, behind that mask, and that when he was ready he'd talk.

As it turned out, I was pretty close to the truth.


	3. Sally

**WHIMPER**

**Chapter 3**

**Sally**

_**Purely for Ewigestudentin. Thanks for the pep talk!**_

* * *

><p>We got so used to Guy that when we met up with Sally that next week, we didn't think to prepare her and she nearly screamed her head off when Brandon casually said "And then there's our silent friend…" and pointed to Guy, who was perched on the remains of a hotel lobby nearby like a church gargoyle. But he won her over fairly quick: it's hard not to like Guy once you get over his looks, as he's thoughtful, polite and best of all doesn't spend ages just chattering like Rowena does.<p>

He was also responsible for finding most of our food, though he didn't ever eat with us: the only reason I know he must have been eating is that he didn't collapse and die over the weeks that followed. Oh, and I saw him throwing away a banana-skin, once. Unless he had a really sick sense of humour and was hoping someone would trip on it, I guess he ate the banana himself.

But we had a lot more to think about than how a man who never takes off his mask gets his dinner. We were six, then, and starting to feel like a community. That's good for people. People weren't meant to live alone. Up until we found Jake, we'd been keeping moving, but Jake had made himself a pretty good shelter in the remains of a multi-storey car park, and so there wasn't any reason not to stick around there for a few days. Guy even found us some extra blankets, from somewhere – they were chilly and stained and smelt musty from water, but it was November, getting dark early and starting to frost, and we weren't going to turn our noses up at them. So we had beds, we had company, it was almost like we had a home again.

Funny how I never thought much about home until I didn't have one. Home's not a building. It's not a place, and it's not all the stuff you've managed to collect. It's more like a feeling. Like finding a balanced place in the middle of an ocean where you can just be rather than having to fight just to keep existing.

And of course when you've got time to do more than just survive, you've got time to think. To consider a future none of us had previously thought we'd ever see.

"What are we going to do?"

Sally said it: all of us had been thinking it. What do you do after the world ends, once you've got food and shelter and you're not too scared of it happening all over again? Rowena was still scared. She used to wake up screaming in the night that the water was rising, that it was rising again and we were all going to die. Every time, a different one of us would get up, go to her and quieten her. It didn't take much, just the touch of a living hand, a few words, and she'd usually go quiet again. But whoever did it, every one of them would relate, at some point the next day: "…and Guy was watching us, all the time. Just sat there against the wall, head tilted, watching."

He seemed to be awake every time, but he never went to Rowena himself, not then.

"We'll have to find somewhere permanent to stay." This from Brandon, the most practical one among us. From somewhere off to the left in the darkness beyond the cast glow of our fire (fire courtesy of Jake and the box of lighters he'd found) there came a short, precise splash and then silence. We all tensed. We jumped at shadows in those early days, not that I'm sure exactly what we were afraid of. It'd have to be a really determined mugger to want to attack the only other living human beings in London.

"Probably Guy," was Jake's opinion, and we all relaxed. Probably true. Guy had vanished out into the dark once the fire was lit, black into blackness. He nearly always did, like a soldier going out to patrol, but he'd be back during the night.

"Guy?" called Rowena, in her high, anxious way. Rowena had been dangerously close to being picked up by the black-baggers, she told me once: she was kind of a hippy. There was probably a lot more to it than that, but I wasn't going to ask. Why would it matter anymore? "Is that you?"

Brandon and Jake snorted in a very masculine way at each other. Rowena frowned at them. "Yeah, okay," she said, "but you gotta keep encouraging him, or he'll never want to talk, right?"

"He'll talk when he's ready," said Sally, in her usual, motherly way, and I agreed with her. "Go on, Brandon. What kind of permanent place did you have in mind?"

"Somewhere a little less exposed than this," Brandon replied, eyeing the pitiful remains of the concrete walls and watching the flames bend and gutter under the wind which was whipping in from the west. "It's going to be winter soon and we can't live out in the open like sheep. We need proper shelter."

"I wonder what the rest of the country looks like?" Jake had cradled his head in his hands. He was lucky: like Guy, he had gloves. The rest of us looked like tramps, dressed in whatever we could find, scrape the mud off and dry by firelight. "Maybe this just happened here. Maybe, like, in Scotland, everything's normal."

"It's not like we have a radio or any TV or anything, pretty much," I said, hearing another sharp splash a little way off and willing myself not to jolt up and stare into the darkness. "How would we know? It's been a long time. No-one's come. No helicopters, no cars, no soldiers or anything." It had been almost three weeks, we'd worked out a few days ago. Jake had been marking time off on the battered concrete of his home in charcoal, and since we'd been together Brandon and I had tried to keep count of sun-ups and sun-downs. Between us we'd come up with three weeks.

"The Chancellor will have survived," said Brandon, with grim certainty. "They have bunkers and special planes and things just waiting to get him out of the way of a disaster."

"But no-one _knew_ it was a disaster," said Sally, softly, "until the very instant it happened."

We fell silent at that, each of us thinking the same thing. We were screwed. Things were going to get harder, and colder, and there was no-one coming to rescue us.

Things hadn't been great, back when London was alive and curfews were in effect and there wasn't anything on TV except more bad news. My parents were always afraid. Apparently, things hadn't always been like they were when I was growing up.

Sally was older than the rest of us, maybe sixty or even seventy years old. She'd been living in a government-run retirement home, but not for too long because she still seemed pretty switched-on. My grandma went into one of those places a frail but sharp old lady. Within a month she'd started seeing imaginary men in the garden and attacking the nurses because she thought they'd come to kill her. Maybe I was just being young and stupid, but it just felt to me like that place had killed her before her body died.

Anyway, Sally wasn't like that at all. She was sharp as a pin and just treated us all - even Guy - like slightly wayward kids. She couldn't help as much with the scavenging, so she did other stuff, stuff we didn't even realise we'd missed, like making sure we dried out our clothes properly, told us to go to bed. Guy most of all came up against Sally's maternal streak pretty hard, because he was as flighty and stubborn as a fourteen-year-old boy when it came to getting any sleep or doing what was expected of him.

But Sally also remembers more than we do about the Chancellor's early days. She remembers when curfews were only for criminals. Things were different.

"People are scared," she said to me one night when the rest of the group had gone out looking for food and I'd volunteered to stay behind with her to help keep the fire lit. "That's the plain truth of it, and there's a good reason people get scared. In the really old days, when we all lived in caves and clubbed mammoth for food, being scared kept you out of the jaws of the tiger. And we've never managed to shake the way we hang onto fear as a defence. No wonder that dreadful man managed to do everything his own way. He knew people were scared and he promised to take that fear away. Who wouldn't want that?"

Sally said to Brandon that first day we met her, while he was helping her out of the ruins of the café, that she didn't understand why she was still alive. All of her children, her grandchildren, all most likely dead. While she, with sixty years of life behind her, still lived.

And that's the other thing of course - the guilt. Now we've got time to think about it, we're all feeling as guilty as hell.

Except perhaps for Guy. Sometimes, I don't know why, but just sometimes I catch Guy looking out at the ruins of the city and I just get the feeling that the faint smile on his mask has grown broader, like behind it he's smiling too.

Sometimes I almost feel like Guy _wanted_ this to happen.


End file.
